A visual book recommender

Oh man, Literature Map looks really great for finding recs.

That said, I do think book-level might be much more valuable. My first thought for this was Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. I haven't read anything else by him yet because my brother informs me his other stuff is entirely different. Looking at Goodreads, I think that qualifies as far from his biggest hit. Is it "more profound?"? Doubtful, but seems likely that you shouldn't group it with his others. I want recommendations based on the book I like, not the author I mostly might-not.

A better example might be how Stephenie Meyer wrote the extremely popular Twilight books, and also The Host which is much less well-known, and better in many respects. Probably qualifies as more profound, too—it's told from the perspective of a parasitic alien. Picture the Yeerks from Animorphs if you read those.)

I wish it was easier to see some of their books, or even copy and search the author from each page.

Whoa, this is a great resource. Never heard of it before, it looks like I'm finally able to get some proper book recommendations. Absolutely loving it.

Weird though that for certain cases it spells English author names with Cyrillic alphabet. Like for instance when I center the graph on "Stanisław Lem", I can see names like George Orwell or Terry Pratchett spelled in Cyrillic. I wonder why.

Stella Gibbons is basically only known for Cold Comfort Farm, but IMO many of her other things are better, although in a different way. My favourite is Pure Juliet, which is a beautifully gentle portrayal of someone who is on the Autism spectrum, written before Autism was really a thing that people talked about.

> Are there any counterexamples, where an author wrote a book that is more profound than their biggest hit but got overlooked for some reason?

Any reply is going to be somewhat subjective, but All Systems Red is not even in my top 5 books by Martha Wells...

Thanks for the nice mention :)

I am about a week away from launching genre pages, age pages, and filters for all those things. So on the hard-science-fiction page, you can filter to see books in a variety of fun ways and keep following your curiosity:

Image showing how it works: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

Hit me up at ben@shepherd.com if you want to try the early preview, just tell me your fav genre and ill send you a link.

Which reminds me of https://fivebooks.com/, where people from a particular field are asked their top five book recommendations for a given theme. The interview format is great, and I've picked up a few recommended books along the way.

Lol, I tried it out and put in one of my favorite books, "Liar's Poker" by Michael Lewis and it suggested me a list of "The best novels to help you understand the rich and dysfunctional."

Spot on! Bookmarked!

woah, didn't know about this site! it is super cool!

It feels like what Pinterest would be without the annoying bits.

Pandora's Star has a direct sequel: Judas Unchained, and Peter F. Hamilton has other books in that (The Commonwealth) millieu.

Additional authors you might enjoy are Neal Asher, Iain M. Banks, Alistair Reynolds, and Jack McDevitt.

Thank you. I agree :)

I have a theory (after having searched for The Diamond Age) that certain very popular books are ironically not going to be close to similar books because they appear on so many varied reading lists.

There's probably a graph theory phenomena that describes what I'm thinking.

Hypothesis: the sort of person who reads "The Victorian...", is likely to both like Harry Potter books, and also to review them enthusiastically online. The typical HP child reader, does not review books online. Just an hypothesis.

Sounds about right to me!